The Intuition Network, A Thinking Allowed Television Underwriter, presents the following transcript from the series Thinking Allowed, Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery, with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove.

MIND AS SOCIETY with MARVIN MINSKY, Ph.D.

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey
Mishlove. We live in an age of increasing human interaction with machines,
intelligent machines perhaps, computers. And more and more the debate about
the nature of intelligence and consciousness, and whether or not machines
will ever be conscious, and whether or not humans are like machines, is
rising to the forefront of our social awareness. We're privileged today
to be with Dr. Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of the research discipline
of artificial intelligence. Dr. Minsky is the author of numerous scientific
papers and several books, including Society of Mind. He is affiliated
with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Media Laboratory at
MIT. Welcome, Dr. Minsky.

MARVIN MINSKY, Ph.D.: Thank you. It's very nice to be
here.

MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to be with you. You know, you
seem to suggest in your book Society of Mind that human intelligence could
be thought of as being like a master machine composed of many, many small
submachines or subunits.

MINSKY: Well, I think that's the idea, all right. Many
people say, "I don't see how a machine could think, or a machine could
be conscious, or a machine has feelings," and I understand why people are
so skeptical of this, because usually when you talk about a machine you're
talking about a typewriter, an automobile engine, or something, and it
has none of those properties. We don't have any experience in our lives
except with people, who are the most complicated machine in the world,
and so it's natural to be skeptical. But what I suggest in this book, and
the kind of theory I work on, is that the mind is many hundreds of different
kinds of computers. It took us four hundred million years to evolve from
the time that we were fish to humans, and what happened in that time isn't
that the brain just got bigger, but it got more complicated, and the book
suggests

-- it's like psychology fiction, you see, because nobody
really knows how the brain works. And so I paint a picture of how you could
have a lot of stupid things -- because computers are stupid -- that could
get together and do the kinds of things that we admire in children and
people, and the sort of things that we're used to in a person.

MISHLOVE: Well, many people would say by definition if
it's a machine it's not conscious.

MINSKY: Well, I think that's a funny way to use words,
and that's absolutely right, I hear this all the time. But then if you
ask people, "Well, what do you mean by consciousness?" they say mysterious
things. I think we can explain consciousness the way science explains other
things. You work for a while, and you try to say what is it that we're
really talking about -- what are the phenomena, what happens in consciousness
that I have to explain? And if you talk to most people they have a very
fuzzy idea of consciousness. They say, "It's being aware of everything
that's going on." Well, we're not. "It's knowing what your mind is doing."
Well, we don't. When I talk, I haven't the slightest idea of the processes
that produce the words. So how I make the words is not conscious, and when
you talk to me, and these sounds come in and I make sense of them, yes,
I'm conscious of the words in a sense, but I'm not at all conscious of
the tremendously complicated processes. We ought to have more respect for
ourselves, and the joke, I think, is that when a person says, "I'm not
a machine," they're showing a lack of respect for people.

MISHLOVE: How is that?

MINSKY: Well, because we're the greatest machine in the
world. The brain has a hundred billion cells. They're organized in a way
that took -- I might sound like Carl Sagan with these millions, but there's
no way to avoid it. If you look at the evolution of animals, five million
years or so ago there were no people. There were chimps, or rather there
was the common ancestor of the chimp. And that's a great animal, and it
does lots of things. It can even learn words. It can't make complicated
sentences. And before the chimpanzees we have all the other kinds of mammals
that you and I know, dogs and cats. And something wonderful happened in
the last few million years, and that's a very short time, because it's
one percent of the time since we were fish. Now, when I say that to say
we're not a great machine is to not respect ourselves, I think -- you see,
when a person says, "I'm conscious, I'm just something different; it's
different from anything else in the world," that's sort of pleasant and
boastful, but it doesn't give you anything to be proud of. It just says,
"There's a little gleaming jewel here, and all my virtue comes from it,
and nothing I did earned it."

MISHLOVE: You know, there's a sense in which, if we look
at the history of science, it's stripping us of our pretensions. Copernicus
robbed us of the notion that we're at the center of the universe, and Darwin
robbed us of the notion that perhaps we descended from the gods, and Freud
robbed us of the notion that we're even in control of our own lives. And
now artificial intelligence is coming along and saying not only aren't
we in control, but we're machines. And it's horrifying, I think, to some
people.

MINSKY: But if you think about it twice, you see, it's
rather just the opposite of that. If we're descended from the gods, well,
that's nice, but it's no reflection on us. There's no virtue to you to
have been created all in one piece. So I think that the so-called humanists
who feel that dehumanizing the person is bad are shielding themselves from
the glory of having -- we're like Prometheus, not like God. We've struggled
for this four hundred million years through the slime, and in every era,
when this animal learned to climb a tree, and learned to take care of the
children when it's cold, and all the different things, then natural selection
added another little part to the brain. And I'd guess there's something
like four hundred kinds of computers, and each of them has developed specially.
The mystery of consciousness, to me, is not, "Isn't it wonderful that we're
conscious?" but it's the opposite -- "Isn't it wonderful that we can do
things like talk and walk and understand, without having the slightest
idea of how it works?" And so that's the mystery -- not that there's some
magic that brings everything together, but that the mind is really incoherent
in a sense. We don't know how we work, and yet the thing works. It's like
a big corporation with no one in charge, and I think it's wonderful.

MISHLOVE: Well, as I understand the endeavor that you're
involved in, in artificial intelligence work, it's as if you can take a
piece of human behavior -- it could be perception, or sensation, or motor
control, or language understanding, or memory -- and you can model that
in a very sophisticated, mechanistic way. And if we put all of these pieces
together, one can say, well, here is the whole human being. But I wonder,
even after you've modeled everything that can possibly be modeled in a
scientific manner, if there still won't be something left, some spark.

MINSKY: Well, I don't think there will be a spark. I think
we'll have a more miserable experience than that. But I think the picture
you painted is right. I don't know if the general public knows how many
wonderful things have happened since around 1950. People have made computers
or other machines do a little bit of vision. We have machines that can
read letters. We have machines that can recognize the sounds of some words.
Right now there's no machine that can look around and tell a dog from a
cat. But there's a reason why there's no such machine -- because when you
look at something like a hand, you're not seeing a hand. You're getting
a lot of information, and your visual system is finding the dangers and
finding the parts, but another part of your brain has this knowledge that
you've built up since childhood. If you see a telephone, something remarkable
happens, because when you see the telephone, it's not just that the word
telephone occurs to you. You know what it means. It's more than seeing.
You know that you talk into this part and you listen here, and that it's
probably going to ring sometime, and then there's a lot of behavior. What
I think is going on in the brain is that yes, there's a lot of machinery
for division and there's a lot of machinery for remembering experiences,
and there are machines for interpreting the sounds of words into processes
that we don't understand yet. I think the 1990s is going to be a wonderful
adventure, because we've had forty years of preparation, of working on
little parts of artificial intelligence, we call it -- machines that can
see a little bit, that can do geometry, that can do some mathematics, do
a little bit of language. But it's chaos, in the sense that for forty years
all sorts of wonderful people have developed little bits. The idea in my
book is to say, is there a way to make one computer program, or one machine,
do all those things? I don't think so. If you had one machine that knew
how to walk and how to see and all those things, I think it would get confused,
and so I think what has evolved in the brain -- and the brain scientists
have confirmed this all the time -- is that if you injure a certain part
of the brain, you can't recognize faces, and yet you can recognize other
things. If you injure another part of the brain, you can't remember how
to work your hand. I think each of these parts of the brain has its own
knowledge, and the reason it's possible for us to function is that we're
like a social organization. One part of the brain, if I wanted a drink
of water, I would go over there to get it. But the part of my brain that
wants the drink of water doesn't know anything about walking, but it can
exploit the other one. It can sort of request to the walking machine, "Say,
you know how to do that. I don't have the slightest idea about how to move
muscles." And so in your head is something magnificent. It's like a whole
city. Maybe I just made up the number four hundred because I like the idea
that maybe one of these developed every one million years, very slow. And
so when I say that a person is a machine, I think that's much better than
saying there's a little spark from which all of your virtue comes, because
then you don't deserve it; it's just a spark.

MISHLOVE: In other words, if we didn't have this mechanical
quality to our mind and our mental functioning, we wouldn't be able to
get anything done.

MINSKY: That's right. If we were just a simple thing

-- a simple machine with a lot of memory, or a simple
soul with a lot of memory -- there'd still be a terrible management problem.
I think what's happened is that by having the brain divided into separate
segments, each of which gets very good at something -- I think every part
of the brain is good at two things. First it's good at doing its job, and
second it's good at learning which other parts of the brain it's connected
to are good for helping with different problems. And so you've got a smoothly
functioning organization in most people. And we forget there are a lot
of people for whom this organization doesn't work; there are a lot of people
in institutions, there are a lot of people who get caught into kinds of
behavior that really destroy themselves. So nobody's perfect, we might
say. But it's amazing, I think, that anything so wonderful and complicated
could work.

MISHLOVE: You know, one of the most interesting ideas
that I have heard attributed to you is that one of the features that make
humans unique and different than computers is that we have imperfect memories
-- a computer can have a perfect memory -- and that it's the struggle with
imperfection that develops certain kinds of awareness we wouldn't otherwise
have.

MINSKY: Yes, and the same for the animals too -- that
they're different from anything else. Let me give an example of that. When
we're talking about something, and somebody comes in, you'd say hello and
then I'd have a good chance of being able to get back to you and remember
where I was. So one of the nice things that a person can do is tolerate
some interruption. Now, in fact since about 1965 or so, computers have
had a certain ability to tolerate interruption -- run one job and stop
it for a moment while it prints something, and come back. For computers
to have this ability to tolerate an interruption, we had to do something.
And I know the people who invented these priority-interrupt systems --

MISHLOVE: Time-sharing kinds of systems.

MINSKY: Right.

MISHLOVE: Humans get very frustrated when they're interrupted
like that all the time.

MINSKY: That's right. In order to make a time-shared computer,
which you didn't have in the 1950s, the first few years, we had to invent
things called short-term interrupt memories, which would help the computer,
if it were interrupted, to just store a little bit of information about
where it was in this job and go to the other job. Now, I think chimpanzees,
and in fact all mammals, have a certain amount of short-term memory of
various sorts, and psychologists every year discover new ones. Neuroscience
is the most exciting field now. I think for the last twenty years it was
microbiology and genetics, and now you see many young people moving into
the brain sciences because that's suddenly starting to break through. And
it's not so much because of discoveries in biology, but because the work
in artificial intelligence, of understanding how to make machines see a
little bit, got so intriguing, and people could see if we knew a little
more about the brain and we used this knowledge from this other field of
artificial intelligence, we'd get something good. Well, there were these
experiments teaching chimpanzees and gorillas words. Koko here in San Francisco
learned hundreds of words, and she could make little sentences. Now, why
couldn't she make the rest of human grammar, the kind of thing that every
three- or four-year-old child can learn?

MISHLOVE: She used sign language, incidentally.

MINSKY: She used sign language, because her throat wasn't
so good for talking. But she learned a lot of words and a lot of nouns
and verbs and some adjectives, a lot of the stuff that young children learn.
But at a certain point it couldn't go further. Here's a theory that comes
from our laboratory about this. If you look at a sentence, you'll find
that adult sentences have interruptions. I could say, "The man who wore
the white shoes went to the mountains." Now, that's really two sentences,
as everybody has known since modern linguistics. First there's one sentence
hidden in there, "There was a man who wore white shoes." The other sentence
is, "The man went to the mountains." What you're doing is, I'm telling
you something about the man who went to the mountains, but suddenly it
occurs to me maybe you don't know which man it was, so I interrupt myself
and I interrupt you, and I say this other thing about "who wore the white
shoes." Now that's something Koko was never able to do, make what you call
a relative clause, because you mustn't lose track of the fact that he was
going up the mountain -- I almost lost track of it myself right now, because
of jet lag. So what you can do is you have a whole mental state. You want
to say something. You interrupt it for a moment to solve a sub-problem,
to develop another idea, and you can get back. Now, I think chimpanzees
generally and gorillas can do this to two levels, but one of our students,
Mitchell Marcus, at MIT some years ago tried to make language machines,
and he discovered with two levels you couldn't do so much. With three levels
he could do almost all of the kind of grammar that young children have.
So there's something that might have happened a million years ago, or two
or three, we don't know. But you see, when people say the mind is so mysterious,
yes, but you have to think, and take science to get -- isn't that such
a simple idea, that maybe the difference between the animals up to then
and the later ones was just having another layer of being able to interrupt
you after you've been interrupted and get back both levels? Animals don't
seem to be able to do that. That's why they can't use tools.

MISHLOVE: When you say levels, you mean of these interrupt
circuits.

MINSKY: Of the interrupt circuits. Same thing that we
did in computers in 1965. And that's a baby theory, and my book has three
hundred pages, and each page has a little theory like that. I don't really
care if two hundred and fifty of them are wrong. I mean, having fifty correct
ideas in a field like that would be too good to expect. But the idea of
this book is to tell people, don't think that you're being dehumanized
when you try to understand yourself as a machine. In the past you've thought
of yourself as a sort of jelly, a sort of unstructured thing which is just
plain good, but no reason for it. I think it's better, maybe for children,
to think of yourself as a package of hundreds of skills. My colleague Seymour
Papert works with children, and sometimes you find a child who's doing
badly

-- he invented the language Logo, which is very popular
in schools these days.

MISHLOVE: A wonderful computer language for children.

MINSKY: Because they can pick it up so quickly, it's very
clear.

MISHLOVE: The language teaches the child, or the child
teaches the language.

MINSKY: Yes, once the kid gets started, they really get
into it. One of the things that we had in our experience here was that
you would find a child, for example, who was having trouble with mathematics,
and you'd talk to the child and say, "What's the problem?" He says, "I'm
no good at math." See, that's the bad side of the wonderful philosophy
that we have a wonderful spark, that there's a central being in your mind
without much structure, and it's either good or bad, you see. The child
has no choice. He has to say, "I'm not good at mathematics." Now how could
that be? But we find once a child has learned more about computers, the
child can say, "Well, I'm good at lots of things. I have a bug in the part
of my mind, the processes that do arithmetic. I'm not ashamed that I can't
carry the one, or forget it; that's just something in a little bit of memory.
Maybe I'll do something about it." When I was a kid, if you had to carry
a one, I'd put it in my pocket, or I'd put it on a tooth. You just tell
the child, "You're a complicated thing. You've got a lot of parts. Most
of them are great. Look, kid, you can talk. Even our scientists don't understand
that. So you're having trouble with math; there's not much to it. Why don't
you try to figure out which of your skills need developing?" So what I'm
saying is, thinking of yourself as a society gives you hope. It's almost
the opposite of what people think, that it devitalizes you.

MISHLOVE: Well, isn't there a holistic principle here
somewhere -- maybe not a spark, that's a funny metaphor. But there are
many people in systems theory in particular who are suggesting that the
whole is more than the sum of its parts.

MINSKY: The whole is more than the sum of its parts, all
right. The whole is exactly the parts and the way that they communicate
with each other. I think in general holistic thinking is not a good thing,
on the whole, I should say. Usually you find it's the way people stop facing
problems and stop working on details, and convince themselves that all
you need is a blurry idea of the thing. Now, what is true is if you have
a complicated system you must have a childishly simple overview of it.
For example, suppose I tried to understand IBM. This is a huge company,
hundreds of thousands of people, they make thousands of products. I can
look at it as a whole and say, "Well, it's like a big, hungry animal, and
it's got a brain which is the people who do this or that." I'd probably
be wrong; it may be that the people who do the hardest job are in marketing,
and the scientists are not.

MISHLOVE: You find a metaphor that expresses the whole.

MINSKY: That's right. So I think that to understand anything,
you have to understand it at many levels. You need a very simple way of
looking at the thing as a whole; you need a more complicated way of looking
at middle-level parts; and you need a great many very small theories at
the bottom. And so I don't mean to say I don't like holism, but I think
the idea that there is a way to understand something deeply all at once
is a dangerous and deadly illusion. On the other side, if you understand
a lot of details -- and not just one, let's have five different ways of
parodying. Let's think of IBM as an animal; let's think of them as a machine
that makes money; let's think of IBM -- I'm running out -- let's think
of it as like a field where you plant seeds and they grow -- whatever you
want. It's important to have not one holistic view of something, because
there's no correct one, but have a whole lot of layers. And that's what
happens when children grow up. Whatever they learn, they make more and
more layers until they stop developing.

MISHLOVE: Do you think that your model can incorporate
some of the extraordinary phenomena of creativity, where, let's say with
a Mozart, a sonata or symphony sort of comes almost fully formed into their
mind?

MINSKY: Yes, but I have a particular gripe with that,
because of course I love Mozart, and I do have a talent; I can make up
mediocre Mozart sonatas. I'm one of those people who can improvise classical
music. I'm no Mozart, but what I can do is make stuff that people say,
"That sounds just like Mozart," and I say, well, little do they know. But
here's the interesting thing -- I don't think of this as creative at all.
When you asked me that question, you made a sentence. A hundred billion
neurons did something that nobody in the world understands. It's just because
every child learns to talk that we don't think of that as creative. So
I don't think our most creative people are in any important way different,
and when we admire what we call geniuses, they just think a little bit
differently. I've had this experience. I know how to talk Mozart. I don't
know how it works; in fact I have trouble writing the music down, I just
do it. But to me it's a very clear experience. It's the same as talking.
I'm explaining something, but I don't have the slightest idea what it is,
and I don't think of it as creative. I think before people fall for the
idea that there is a creative spark they should look at themselves talking
to a friend or a neighbor, and then consult a linguist and say, "Do you
understand anything about how I did that?" And if they're honest they'll
say, "As far as I can tell that's just as complicated as what Beethoven
did in the symphony, just to say a paragraph."

MISHLOVE: How about the issue of intentionality? Is it
the case that we can ascribe intentionality to a machine?

MINSKY: Oh yes. But you see, people say there's such a
thing as having a goal, and that's sort of a primitive thing that a machine
can't have, but I don't see why they say that. My friends Newell and Simon
some years ago -- they're also early workers in this field -- discovered
a wonderful way to make a machine have a goal. You would give it a description
of something, what you want -- maybe let's go back to that glass of water.
You want some water in your hand. You see some over there. You say, what's
the difference between -- the goal is what you want, but you don't have
to want it, all you need is the machine I'm describing. It compares this
state of the water in the hand with the one there and says, what's the
difference? The difference is it's too far away. Let's do something to
reduce that difference. So maybe I have to walk over there.

MISHLOVE: But in this case the goal was programmed into
the machine by a human. The machine didn't choose a goal.

MINSKY: That's right. What I'm saying is those aren't
mysterious. Norbert Wiener talked about this in 1950. Goals are machines
that reduce the difference between something that's fixed and something
you can change. Now, in this half billion years of evolution, we got brain
centers that have about twenty goals. They're triggered by various things.
If there's too little water in your blood or wherever the sensors are,
then it turns on this machine that is built, it's programmed by thousands
of genes that have accumulated by trial and error to get water. When you're
hungry, it turns on something, you get food. When you're a baby, the way
you get food is to cry, and your mother gives you some, but gradually you
learn other ways. And so we start out with about a dozen goals. I think
the thing that made humans different from the other goal machines that
are the other animals is that we discovered that if you want something,
not only can you do something to get it, but it pays to learn more about
the thing. So as a child grows it gets new subgoals that weren't there
in the genes, which are let's get knowledge because it might come in handy,
and let's get power, learn skills, so that we will be able to solve problems
we don't even have yet. So to me, the important thing about the child is
the fact that for the first time in evolution -- in other words, intentionality
is not exactly the thing to focus on; worms and flies have it, in the sense
that you can see them pursuing a goal that's moving around. The great thing
about humans is a more neutral way of accumulating knowledge and power
that you don't need the very next minute, so that if you ask, "What makes
the difference between man and animal or man and machine?" you find it
isn't what people say much. Sometimes it's the ability to think without
a goal, that as far as we can tell animals don't have. I have a wonderful
cat, and when it isn't looking for food or a mouse, it sits there contentedly
and it's not doing anything, because it's too dominated by goals, and when
it doesn't have one it's just on hold. But you and I can't stop thinking.

MISHLOVE: Well, you as an example -- you have chosen to
build a whole lifetime career in the search for better ways of developing
artificial intelligence. It's a choice you made. Do you think that ultimately
you'll be able to model or design computers that can choose careers?

MINSKY: Oh well, I'm very elated by what's happened in
that forty years, because I started thinking about these things in college
in the late 1940s, and like other fields, every year something wonderful
has happened. What I'm afraid is that if I go back to saying maybe there's
four hundred important mental functions realized here, maybe it'll take
four hundred years, in which case what I should do is work on the life-extension
problem. But I think once we get beyond skepticism, because there's skepticism
about many things -- once we get people to say, don't assume that something
is a mystery, but dig into it, that these problems will go away. We'll
understand emotions -- I have a nice theory in the book of why pain hurts,
which is people don't even ask that, they just assume that it should. And
what I think hurting is, is it's reducing you to infancy. As you grow you
get these many levels, and I bet the pain nerves are connected so that
you can't do this thought. If a lobster has got you by the toe, then what
the pain nerves do is reduce the level of your thought so that you get
down to the immediate goal and you have to do something about it. And the
reason it hurts is that the rest of your brain can't stand being postponed.
So I think you take all the mysteries, and there are lots of little theories
that you can make for those.

MISHLOVE: Dr. Marvin Minsky, it's been a pleasure being
with you. You know, it seems as if in way you are a modern-day Prometheus,
suggesting that we can indeed penetrate to the mysteries that were once
reserved only for the gods or for mystics or for creative artists, and
I can't help but feel that you pursue that task with an intensity that
is really quite admirable. It's hard for any of us to say really where
it will lead. It's been a real pleasure sharing this half hour with you.
Thank you so much for being with me.